Ashton-Tate
From Freepedia
Ashton-Tate (Ashton-Tate Corporation) is a former US based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application. The company was bought by Borland in September 1991, who no longer sells any of their products.NOTE: This page needs additional research to be complete and correct. It omits lots of history and contains many inaccuracies that need to be corrected, including the omission of most of the companies PC product line, which was the lion's share of the companies development and sales.
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dBASE
Ashton-Tate was founded by George Tate and Hal Lashlee as Discount Software, a small distribution company in the era of magazine software shops. In 1980 they received a phone call from a customer of a new database program called Vulcan, who suggested they look into selling the product. In fact the author, C. Wayne Ratliff, had tired of working on the product for no real profit, so the two offered to take over marketing under a new name. Apparently Lashlee preferred his name not to be used, so the fictitious name Ashton was created, and Ashton-Tate was born.
An early print advertisement featured a fictional character named Joe Ashton - soon, callers to Ashton-Tate tech support trying to get better service sometimes claimed they were personal friends of Joe Ashton. Later, for a time, a large parrot named Ashton was kept in a cage near the front door of the company in order to easily answer where the name came from.
At first sales of the newly renamed dBase remained much as it had been when Ratliff sold it directly, but the introduction of the IBM PC in 1982 changed things dramatically. The company was soon able to hire Ratliff full time, and were able to offer an IPO the next year. The company's headquarters moved to a building on Jefferson Boulevard in Culver City, and finally to a brand new building in Torrance. Development was spread throughout the Los Angeles area, although dBASE work was centered at their Glendale offices.
George Tate died suddenly in August of 1983 or 1984, and many say the company was never the same again. David Cole took over briefly, but after he suddenly left for Ziff-Davis, Ed Esber Jr. became CEO--and the rest, as they say, is history.
Esber became famous for his vacillating support for many of their projects, seemingly random management decisions, and the attempt to pay bills as late as possible. In one case the electricity bill was paid so late that power was cut off to their Glendale offices, home of dBASE development. Later he decided to move the entire company from the Los Angeles area to silicon valley, thereby causing delays right in the midst of a key product release cycle.
Esber especially disliked third-party developers and trainers--he felt that every product they sold was money that Ashton-Tate should have been making. He went to great lengths to stop them with cease-and-desist letters and threats of legal action. At one point he even stood up at a conference and threated to sue anyone who made a dBASE compatible product, screaming "Make my day!"
As a result of this continued antagonism, the spurned third-party community slowly abandonded dBASE, taking their business, their clients, and their recomendations elsewhere.
Framework
Ashton-Tate attempted to break out of their dependence on dBASE on a number of occasions, but their most successful attempt was with Framework. Framework, like dBASE before it, was the brainchild of a single author, Robert Carr, who felt that integrated applications offered huge benefits over a selection of separate apps doing the same thing. In 1983 he had a runnable demo, and showed it to Ashton-Tate, who immediately signed a deal to support development in exchange for marketing rights.
Framework was a DOS-based office suite that combined a word processor, spreadsheet, mini-database application and an outliner. Although DOS based, Framework sported a full GUI based on character graphics (similar to Borland's OWL) that was functional if not as pretty as the Mac.
Framework eventually got locked into an industry battle, primarily with Lotus Symphony, and later with Microsoft Works. When Borland eventually purchased Ashton-Tate then sold Framework to Selections & Functions, who continue to sell it today.
Mac products
From the earliest days of the Apple Macintosh, Ashton-Tate professed an interest in becoming a major player in the new market. As early as the winter of 1984, only a few months after the Mac's introduction, the company purchased a small Mac database developer and moved them to their Glendale development center to work on what would later be known as dBASE Mac. Soon after this in early 1985 they agreed to fund development of a spreadsheet program being developed by Randy Wigginton, project lead of MacWrite. Years later they added a "high-end" word processor from Ann Arbor Softworks, who were in the midst of a rather public debacle while trying to release FullWrite Professional which was now almost a year late.
dBASE Mac shipped in September 1987, but it was dBASE in name only. The product was in fact completely different, and in many ways more powerful, but users were dismayed to learn that in order to interact with their major investment in dBASE on the PC, their applications would have to be re-written from scratch. Adding to their frustration was the fact that it crashed a lot and was extremely slow. Given that the program was really a completely new Mac-only system, it had to compete with other Mac-only database systems like 4th Dimension, Helix and FileMaker which were even better.
FullWrite and Full Impact were released in 1988. Both were generally liked by reviewers, but suffered from poor releases. FullWrite would barely run on common hardware, seriously limiting its potential market, while Full Impact had the bad luck of being timed just after a major new release of Microsoft Excel and the release of Informix Wingz. All three products were also notable for their bugs.
The entire Ashton-Tate Mac experience is a textbook example of mismanagement. Upper-level management vacillated on the Mac market through three years of product development, sometimes cutting off payments to the developers until deciding a few months layer the Mac was the next big thing once again. This caused lengthy delays to all of the products and thereby handed the market to other players. Full Impact, for instance, should have been a big hit had it shipped only six months earlier, but instead ended up being the third spreadsheet to be released and therefore struggling for exposure.
All three products were excellent at their core, but really needed upgrades to fix the bugs and link the products together more cleanly. Instead it appears that Ashton-Tate immediately went over to their "the Mac is dead" phase and ignored them completely. Releases of Microsoft Word and Excel soon closed some of the feature gaps, and as the MacOS changed the products became increasingly difficult to run.
FullWrite was later sold off by Borland in 1994 to an enterprising 3rd party, Akimbo Systems, but by that time Microsoft Word had taken over the entire market and they too eventually gave up on it. dBASE Mac was sold off in 1990 and re-released as nuBASE, but it was no more successful and was gone within a year. Full Impact simply disappeared.
Decline and fall
dBASE IV was introduced in late 1988 and was both slow and very buggy. Most customers refused to use the product, waiting for it to be fixed. Many took this as an opportunity to try out one of the legions of dBASE clones that had appeared recently, notably FoxBase and Clipper, which turned out to be better all along. dBASE IV destroyed any goodwill the company had.
The decline of Ashton-Tate is given a full chapter in the book In Search of Stupidity by one-time Ashton-Tate employee or consultant Rick Chapman, although he got a few minor details wrong.
Products
- dBASE
- Framework - integrated word processor, outliner and spreadsheet application.
- InterBase - purchased from Groton Database Systems
- MultiMate - DOS-based word processor
Notes
This document claims the original name of the company was Software Plus and that they sold discount software, as opposed to being called that.
